


Feather

by VVuser8



Series: Femslash February [5]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: A lot - Freeform, But yeah I will expand on this, F/F, Femlash February 2021, Femslash, Femslash February, Femslash February Celebrates Black Women, Longer than the others, Primrue, Time Loop, Time Loop AU, Time Travel, hope you enjoy!, more content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29208015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VVuser8/pseuds/VVuser8
Summary: Day 5: Feather- Primrue (Time Loop)Hope you enjoy, longer than usual. Will expand later.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen & Primrose Everdeen, Katniss Everdeen/Madge Undersee (mentioned), Primrose Everdeen & Rue, Primrose Everdeen/Rue
Series: Femslash February [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138256
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Femslash February, femslash100





	Feather

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to ask for requests for Femslash Feb and/or Black History Month. I've made a promise to myself to post daily, and after posting this imma bout go work on some Primrue, but unrelated. Request anything honestly, not just fics- OCs, picrews, headcanons, if you rlly want to art (but art is my weak suit so plz don't) as long as it's related to wlw or blm.

Rue bleeds into the ground, her last moments filled with pain and sweet lullabies, and the eyes of her ally.

Prim’s last moments are filled with explosions and darkness and one last look from her sister.

Then they’re gone. Forever. Into where dead people go.

Or so they thought.

***

Primrose Everdeen blinks as she wakes up back in District 12, lying on her bed. The cold air brushes against her neck, and she’s surprised. Looks like she survived the blast. But where is everyone else? She gets up, getting ready to help care for the wounded, but noticing that she’s relatively scar-free, and isn’t feeling any physical pain related to bombing. She feels hungry sure, and the old scar on her face from when she went hunting once is fresh and cool. Scars that she could swear used to be there are gone. And she feels different… and from what she can see, she looks different too. She’ll need to head to the pond later that day to double check.

She tests out her feet gingerly, before heading out. Their home seems pretty much the same as it was a long time ago, and she’s surprised by the lack of paparazzi. She’s wearing a dress she’d thought she’d grown out of and given away ages ago.

And she’s alive. She’s pretty sure she died in that explosion, but she supposes she must have been mistaken. It’s incredibly surprising how she isn’t even injured, or how she didn’t stir once during recovery. And how she’s somehow back home when there’s a war going on and she has to help look after the wounded. Maybe the only impact of the bombing for her was that she somehow got shorter, as she notices she can’t reach the middle shelf without a ladder, and she thinks about how lucky she really is.

She heads out into the living room, and her mother is there, a meal sitting on the table (roasted he villduck) and she’s surprised and nostalgic for the times when they were back home, Katniss hunting food for them and the others while living their life in District 12.

She wonders for a second whether this is actually a dream, and that actually makes a lot of sense, so much that she wonders how she didn’t think of it before. She turns, heading out of the room.

Surprise overwhelms her as she opens the door to the village. It was dreary, and the people walking around it looked sick, hungry and miserable. There were quite a lot of people, a lot more than Prim had seen the last time she had come here. Some people were alive that she knew had died long ago.

(Seems I’m dreaming about before the war, when I was younger…)

“Prim!” called her mother from the house.

“Coming!” she yells, and runs inside. Her mothers eyes are weary, as they were when they relied on Katniss for everything, like they were when she was still mourning her dad.

“Now, now,” she mutters, “let me do your hair, we need to get ready for the reaping.” Her mother does her hair into the familiar french braid, and Prim feels uneasy. She can feel her hair on her back, her mum pulling it back and braiding it together. Maybe someone’s braiding it for her back at the hospital. Or it’s one of those uh- lucid dreams. She’s heard of people being able to hallucinate that visibly especially when…

Still, she wants to check, though she also doesn’t want to wake up, and pinching herself could easily result in being woken up quickly, so she settles for a while, content to observe the dream and the reassuring gaze of her mother, and the warmth of home.

As the door opens, she looks up and sees her sister. Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire, the person she loved the most in the world. She looks so young… she knows for sure which reaping this really is now. The one where Katniss volunteers in her place. Hell, she really had to think about this now, huh…

She can feel the sand beneath her feet now, and is now increasingly nervous. It’s unlikely she would feel this while lying in bed in real life, so this must be some extended hallucination, one where she can feel pain and all sorts and that would be bad. She pinches her cheek, and winces when it throbs, but nothing happens. She screws her eyelids together, trying to wake up. SHe can’t.

Why does she have a strage, sinking feeling that this is real?

Oh hell. Oh no. No, no, bloody way.

She’s somehow back, back in time, back to when the reaping was taking place and damn, if there’s one thing she knows it’s that she can’t let Katniss go through that again.

Prim’s name is chosen in the reaping.

Katniss volunteers.

Prim spills everything to her mum and the others in a desperate attempt to fix things.

Not much changes. She dies not long later.

She awakes again, back in her bed in District 12. She wonders for a second whether everything that happened, the war and the time travel and everything was a huge dream, but she doesn't think so.

That morning, she talks to Katniss.

“Hey Katniss, about the reaping,” starts Prim, “If I’m chosen, promise not to volunteer for me.”

Katniss blinks and crouches down to look at her. “You’re not going to be picked okay. I’ll make sure of that.”

Prim swallows. “Okay, but just in case, promise?”

“What brought this on?” asks Katniss. “Prim, you know I can’t promise something like that.”

“Katniss, if you don’t promise to not volunteer to me, then I swear and promise that I will volunteer in your place.”

Her sister's eyes widen in alarm. “Prim, why…”

“Please Katniss.”

She can see the cogs turning in Katniss’s head. However, Katniss also knows the odds. It’s 20 times more likely for Katniss to be picked than Prim, and if she doesn’t promise a 20 times more chance that Prim will volunteer for her and Katniss for Prim, and she knows Katniss has always been overprotective. And she knows Katniss has this in mind when she leans over and says, “I promise.”

***

“..Primrose Everdeen!”

Prim can feel Katniss rooted to the spot beside her, eyes wide, and she feels sorry for doing this to her. But she knows her sister isn’t one for moping, even when guilt is tearing at her. She has a feeling in her gut that her sister will be rooting for her all the way, that she will believe in her, and that’s why, as she mouths the word Promise to Katniss, who is on the verge of tears and rushing up their regardless, that is why she will make sure to win these games. She has foresight, and has watched these particular games on repeat again and again. She thinks she might be able to win this.

(...and what then?)

Haymitch sways drunkenly on his feet, and sways over. Katniss cries out in the crowd and is dragged away. Prim listens as they read out the name of the male tribute, Peeta Mellark, one of Katniss’s best friends, one who she had to pretend to love in order to survive.

Prim is half-zoned out through the final farewells, but she cries anyways, and she means it when she promises she’ll win. That spark of rebellion still runs through her heart.

Later that day, Katniss hands her the mockingjay pin. Prim looks at it curiously. It’s the same mockingjay pin that her sister's crush had given her last time, the one that had become a national icon around the world. She clutches the pin tight to her chest, before pinning it to her blouse.

***

Haymitch asks her for her talents. Peeta mentions that he can lift and frost cupcakes. Prim mentions that she can heal. She doesn’t mention anything else, and she certainly doesn’t mention even her healing to anyone else. From what she’s heard from Katniss, Haymitch can be trusted.

Cinna designs their outfits. Prim feels odd being the new ‘girl on fire’ but she supposes it fits anyways, and there's no reason to change what they didn’t even know was changing. She spots the District 11 tributes as they walk out, and her eyes are drawn to one in particular. Rue. She’d seen Rue on the television, and her death. Katniss had seemed fiercely loyal to her, and Prim herself had a certain fondness in her heart that was hard to explain. She felt as if she would do anything for her, for Rue, but that was silly really. She barely knew the girl.

Rue seems different, in a way. Certainly more prepared than she’d been last time she’d arrived, and she’d been equipped the last time too. Her eyes are deep and brown, and sparkle with a golden warmth that makes her heart jittery, and when they brush over hers Prim feels a strange familiarity. They are both the same, in a particular way that Prim just can’t lay her finger on.

Prim didn’t remember much about the hubbub and the paparazzi and the outfits. Cinna seems nice, but she knows this already. She leaves him a note about the next games, warning him to be careful without speaking outright. Maybe this can be one death she prevents.

One thing that does stick in her mind is talking to Rue. She goes over to her, and they sit next to each other, and the silence is comforting really, amicable, warm, fizzly. She’s sitting in Rue’s presence after all, and her company is surprisingly lovely, sending her heart in cartwheels even though she’s not sure why.

The other girl looks at her. “You’re stuck too,” she says flatly, and Prim almost chokes. Looks like she isn’t the only person stuck in the time loop, she figures, and nods. “You survive longer than me, so what happens after I die?”

And Prim finds everything spilling out, the war, the rebellian, her first loop, the deaths in the war, and she’s surprised by how it just flows out, how she doesn’t hesitate to tell Rue everything. She’s surprised by how much blind faith she has in the girl already.

Rue is silent through the whole thing, mainly blank-faced though her expression shifts sometimes, briefly. Prim can feel her hand gripping hers when she describes her own death, and she’s surprised by how comforting her hand is, and how neither of them seem to want to let go.

“Hey,” mutters Rue, looking down at her hands, “you want to form an alliance.”

“Of course.”

They stick together during the game. Rue helps her climb trees and avoid the others. Prim gathers food and supplies, and makes sure she keeps healthy. Rue nicks weapons from the others too, to turn them against each other. Prim heals her injuries, but she is worried for Rue. And each day they talk when the camera’s aren’t focused on them, in the most remote places they can, about what to do now they know what’s going to happen, and how to make things better. Neither of them know at all, but they won’t give up.

“You need to be careful,” Prim mutters, bandaging up the last of Rue’s wounds and pecking her on the cheek. “I don’t like it when you get hurt.”

Rue smiles at Prim, and her smile warms up Prim’s heart like honey, warm and kind and slightly cocky, just as amazing as she is. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m not gonna die on you.”

Rue doesn’t keep that promise. That next day, she dies, stabbed from behind, and that is the day Prim gets her first kill. She wrestles Rue’s killer to the ground, and they stab her too, but she manages to take them out.

They bleed together, and Prim places flowers on Rue’s chest, crawling over and singing through her pain, even when she collapses on the ground beside her. Rue joins in, and they both sing Katniss’s lullaby, singing and singing and singing until death.

***

Prim wakes up again in District 12. She tries to remember what she did last time, the promise and the reaping happening as planned, though seeing Katniss’s face fall again breaks her inside, and she knows that in the other timeline… oh no. She can barely look her sister in the face.

“Goodbye little duckling,” she whispers as she hugs her goodbye, handing her the pin once more.

She gets through the costumes. Her eyes meet Rue’s and so many unspoken words are exchanged and her heart twists in her chest. Rue’s hair bounces as she walks… and as she runs.

Prim finally gets a chance to talk to Rue. They meet outside and Rue asks a single question. “W-was that real?”

Prim nods and they talk about their recent deaths, which neither of them can get out of their minds, but are desperately trying to forget. Talking about it feels good, like letting out a long breath. Prim mentions that Katniss called her “Little Duck” and Rue mentions that she called her “Little Bird” back in that old time line. And maybe they both had feathered wings too, so that’s why they keeped flying against time every time they died, as if flying away from time and death

They work together again in the games, but this time it’s different. They stay alive by collecting fruits and Prim healing Rue’s wounds. They stay up in the trees, Rue helping her climb and move from tree to tree, Prim healing her wounds and helping to gather food. They hunt down Cato and put an end to him. They feel slightly sorry afterwards, but he had caused Rue’s death, so not as sorry as Prim would have been.

Eventually, only Thresh, Peeta, Foxface, Rue and Prim are left in the arena.

Foxface is found dead not long later, hands by a pile of nightlock berries. Rue remembers how skilled Foxface had been at identifying poisonous and edible plants in the training centre, and her hand grips Prim’s, faces gaunt and shellshocked.

“Hey Prim,” says Rue, sitting beside her, swinging her legs, “what should we do? We know what’s going to happen, but what do we do? Do we not kill anyone and let the Capitol take revenge until someone does? Do we let the other two kill each other and do the berry thing. I really don’t want to do that, to let them kill each other. Could we convince the other two to do the berry thing? Should we contact Haymitch?”

Prim looks uncertain. “Maybe contact Haymitch, but I’m not sure what to say. Should we tell him everything? Start a new loop and tell him everything? Ask him for help? Maybe arrange a way out of here, or something like what happened in the second games?”

Rue nods quietly. “Hey Prim,” she starts, “I’m glad you're alive.”

Prim nods. “I’m glad you're alive too.” Her hand reaches out, and Rue squeezes it tight. They sit in the warm silence, hands entwined.

***

They sit and look out over the clearing, poisonous berries in pockets. They feel uneasy, but they also know that if this doesn’t work, they’ll always have a second chance. And having second chances is one of those things that almost never happens, so they decide that they’ll use these seconds chances of theirs to make the world a better place.

“Before I go,” whispers Prim, “I’m glad I got to meet you. And I’m glad we’re in this together.”

Rue nods quietly, hugging Prim tight, “Same.” And then, she whispers, muffled into her shoulder. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

And then they kiss, and Rue tastes amazing, like berries, fish and fruits with a hint of something special, like Rue, and Prim feels like the luckiest person in the world. It’s a soft gentle kiss, and she can feel Rue smiling brightly through it, and she can’t help but grin herself. They’re together, and for one brief second that’s all that matters.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Plz comment!


End file.
